Building On #StarWarsNotStarWars

Star Wars Is Great

Lest anyone think that I don’t like Star Wars, given some of the earlier posts here, I have to make this point. Nothing could be farther from the truth. It’s why I have issues with some of the later entries in the franchise; I think that they don’t do justice to what Star Wars could be. The Original Trilogy remain classics, and having just gone back and rewatched all three, back to back, they still hold up. (Which is why I don’t care for the argument that, “Star Wars is full of plot holes anyway, so you’re dislike of later installments is invalid.”) There’s an ever-expanding universe of new worlds, new aliens, new ships, and hints of a long history.

Star Wars is a huge source of inspiration for The Unity Wars. Because when you watch the movies, there’s a lot that’s implied without being said. And that stuff that’s implied lends huge opportunities for storytelling.

#StarWarsNotStarWars

Nick Cole coined StarWarsNotStarWars to describe Galaxy’s Edge. I’ve shamelessly stolen it, because it fits. Perhaps TheCloneWarsNotTheCloneWars would better describe The Unity Wars, but you get the point.

What Nick and Jason Anspach are doing with Galaxy’s Edge isn’t copy-and-paste fan-fiction. They have instead taken a lot of the tropes and elements of the Star Wars setting and used them in their own way. And that’s what I’m trying to do here, just in a different way from Nick and Jason.

Inspiration

As part of the effort to recapture some of the feel of the Original Trilogy while still being unique, I’ve done some digging lately, into the background of Star Wars. Not the fictional background, mind you, but some of the background of how the stories of the movies came together. I’ve read articles about the so-called “Secret History of Star Wars,” and watching the original movies has sparked some ideas as well. But one of the most interesting places to look has been the “Jedi Bendu Script Site.”

There’s a lot there. I ran into the “Fall of the Republic” story treatment a long time ago, and thought it was intriguing. (I actually found the site looking for that script again.) Lucas might have drawn on a lot of the stuff he’d grown up with, including Flash Gordon, Lensman, and stuff like that, but he was clearly putting together a bigger setting, where lots of different sorts of stories could be told. And that’s what I’m aiming for with The Unity Wars.